We will serve the robots who tell our stories, and other apocalyptic technophobia

Artists are fearful of being replaced by AI art as more and more individuals begin fancying themselves Picassos even though they cannot paint. It's created a good deal of anxiety for art practitioners and even those who work as copywriters like myself. I have been anticipating this for a while, so I'm not shocked by these developments. Neither am I shocked that it has caused a great deal of anxiety.

I hope that some of what I have to say allays that anxiety.

Collective memory

That's what AI provides. A collective memory of artistic contributions. I agree with artists who had their works placed in databases without their consent. They should have had the option of opting out at the beginning. Instead, their work was taken and they were given the option of opting out after the fact, likely to avoid lawsuits. 

This means that there are many who aren't appreciating the beauty of what we now have. In a database, we have the collective contributions of human artistic genius and we've made it generative. But, it cannot innovate ahead of us. It's always going to be a generation behind. Why? Because its source material is all memory.

If it were up to me, this would be a way to honor the contributions of the greatest artists of all time upon their passing. It would be a way to have them around with us always.

Innovating machines

What do you need to innovate? You need discomfort. That's it. A comfortable human doesn't innovate. A comfortable ape doesn't evolve. A machine that generates images out of a database doesn't feel. And thus, it cannot innovate. There are efforts at sentient machines, sapient machines, and the like. But I suspect that they won't do much until they feel uncomfortable.

A call to artists

On some basic level, I've been waiting for something like this my entire life. As a poet, I operate on language. Language is fine, but (for reasons I can explain elsewhere) paintings are language. In some cases, they can convey more than words. 

This is an opportunity to innovate beyond memory, feel uncomfortable, take risks, and evolve. It won't replace logo designers, graphic designers, and illustrators. It will make their jobs easier. I remain cautiously optimistic that I'm not headed for bankruptcy because of AI writing.